


Wild Romance

by MyOwnSuperintendent



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s06e03 Triangle, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-04
Updated: 2017-05-04
Packaged: 2018-10-27 22:48:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10818360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyOwnSuperintendent/pseuds/MyOwnSuperintendent
Summary: It'll be sixty years next week, but she still remembers that strange night in 1939.





	Wild Romance

**Author's Note:**

> I don't own The X-Files or anything related to it. Hope you enjoy!

 

“That is so cool!” Kate exclaims, her eyes shining.  “When I grow up, I’m going to fight Nazis too.”

“You can’t fight Nazis now, we beat them years ago,” Nora says.  “Dumb-dumb.”

“Yes, the war ended a long time ago,” she says quickly, before her granddaughters can start fighting.  “But it was a nice idea, Kate.  And you can always make sure that you stand up for the right thing, no matter who you’re standing against.  Both of you,” she adds, and she takes the girls’ hands again as they continue their walk through the National Museum of American History.  She’s glad she made this visit to Washington.  She doesn’t get to see her daughter and her granddaughters enough, as far as she’s concerned—the girls already seem so much bigger then when she saw them last.  They went to this museum together a couple of years ago, and they only wanted to look at the dollhouse and the ruby slippers then; now they’re old enough to take more interest in other parts of history.  “You know, I was a part of that,” she told them when they were looking at the World War II section, and the way they hung on her words as she told them a bit about her experiences put a smile on her face.

As they start down the stairs, Nora asks, “Grandma, during the war, did you ever have a wild romance?”

“A wild romance?” she asks.  “What do you mean?”

Nora gestures vaguely.  “Oh, you know,” she says.  “Like maybe you met a man, and he was a soldier, and you fell madly in love with each other and had a whirlwind love story, but he had to go to the war, and you had to do your work, and duty was more important than love and everything, but he took your handkerchief with him and he gave you a picture to remember him by, and maybe he died or something but you always kept the picture?”

“Good lord,” she says, unable to help smiling.  “No, nothing like that ever happened to me.  What kind of books are you reading?”

Nora shrugs.  “Just books.”

“Well, whatever books they are,” she says, “they sound much more exciting than my real life, I’m afraid.”

They’re coming out of the museum now, and Kate asks, “Can we get ice cream?”

“We certainly can,” she says.  “Is there somewhere near here you like to go?”  The girls nod in unison—they may squabble sometimes, but this is clearly one thing they can agree on.  “Lead the way, then,” she says, and they head down the street. 

She thinks about Nora’s words as they walk.  Nothing like that ever happened to her, it’s true.  She never met a man who was a soldier—Frank had been one, of course, but they didn’t meet until after the war, in the mid-forties, when he was working in a hardware store and she in an office.   She never fell madly in love, or in love at all, before she met him.  She never exchanged pictures and handkerchiefs, and she thinks that’s a bit of a silly idea: memories are strong enough.

She’s got plenty of memories, and there’s one in particular that’s coming to mind now.  Almost nothing that Nora said has anything to do with her own experiences, but one word—“whirlwind”—calls the memory up, makes her think back to 1939, to the story she’s always found too odd to share with anyone.  She’d been in other tight spots, other strange situations, over the course of her time with the OSS, but that one was surely the strangest of all.

There’s still much that she doesn’t understand about that night.  She doesn’t understand where the man came from, first of all.  When he showed up, he talked to her like they knew each other—“It’s me, Mulder,” he said, as if that was supposed to mean something to her.  The accent was American, but the uniform was German, and she didn’t want him anywhere near her.

But then…then came the terrible scene in the ballroom.  She thought at first that he truly knew nothing—how could he have known?  And then they pointed the gun at her head, and she stood there, a part of her terrified, a part of her worried about what this would do to her mother, a part of her thinking that she’d always known it might come to this and at least she was giving her life for a cause in which she believed.  It didn’t come to that, though.  He pointed to the dead man, and she somehow knew he was defending her, even while still refusing to give up the secret.

She couldn’t help liking the man for that.

They became a team then, in some strange way.  She still didn’t know who he was or how he was involved in all this, but she followed him out of the ballroom when the fighting broke out and let him take her hand as they ran down the corridor.  She listened to his incredible, nonsensical story about needing to save history, about her needing to turn the ship around—she didn’t know what he was talking about, and she said so, but she did listen.

And then, out of nowhere, he pulled her close and kissed her.  If Nora was looking for a wild romance, perhaps that moment would fit the bill.  It wasn’t a love story, of course, or anything like that.  He was little more than a stranger to her, and while that night did pass through her mind at times, she certainly never had any regrets, never wished that they might pick up where they left off (one night like that was quite enough for a lifetime, as far as she was concerned).  But for a long moment, it was a kiss, a nice deep kiss that warmed her body, a kiss that made her feel good.

Not that she wanted him to think he could be in the habit of going around grabbing near strangers and kissing them.  Which was why she punched him.

And then, strangest of all, he jumped over the side of the ship.  She had no idea what he was doing then; she could only throw a life preserver and stare after him until she couldn’t see him anymore.

She thought about what he’d said, about the way he’d said it, urgent and earnest, his voice full of something that made her want to trust him.  She thought about it, and then she headed below decks, to make sure they turned the ship around.

She never saw this man, this Mulder, again, and next week it’ll be sixty years.  How’s that for a whirlwind?

They arrive at the ice cream shop, and she stands behind her granddaughters while they choose their flavors, Kate confident in her choice of something called Death by Chocolate, Nora dithering for a while before settling on Oreo.  She gets mint chocolate chip herself, and they head outside with their cones, taking a seat on a bench in front of the store.

There’s no other explanation than her eyes playing tricks on her.  Her eyesight isn’t perfect these days, and she’s just been remembering that night, after all.  But she looks up from her cone, and for a moment she could swear she sees him—the man from all those years ago—starting to cross the street.

She quickly tells herself that she’s being ridiculous.  She only thinks she sees him because he’s on her mind.  Besides, this man is young; if it really were him, he’d be her age.  She certainly doesn’t see him, and she certainly— _certainly_ —doesn’t see herself walking beside him.  There’s no way that she can be seeing herself, herself as she was then, young and with her hair red instead of gray.  She’s just imagining things.

She blinks a few times, and when she looks again, the people she thought were the two of them are gone.  They weren’t the two of them, of course; how could they be?  Just a trick of the light, she tells herself.  Just her thoughts.  Just memories.

She shakes her head, smiling ruefully at herself, and leans down to wipe a smear of chocolate ice cream off of Kate’s chin.


End file.
